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Monitoring Human Land Use

Including human land uses in conservation planning

Inclusion of human land uses is essential to effective conservation planning. Human land use not only triggers environmental impacts that must be taken into account but also drives an understanding of the important local needs met by the surrounding ecosystems. The resulting insights uncover the value of conservation to sustain and enhance livelihoods in local communities.

JGI applied conservation science informs and supports conservation planning initiatives in many African communities. This planning process explicitly includes human land uses and allows us to identify conservation efforts that will benefit people as well as chimpanzees and other great apes.

JGI’s science team leverages state-of-the-art technology to understand land uses from the micro to macro scales for greater impact than previously possible. For example, JGI’s team identified potential areas for reforestation outside Gombe National Park in Tanzania benefitting both people and chimpanzees using 60-cm QuickBird images to map individual trees, farms, houses and footpaths inside and outside the park. These land use features have been extracted from the imagery using Feature Analyst, a product of Overwatch Gesospatial, a Textron Systems Company as an extension in ArcGIS produced by ESRI. Such type of data. JGI has been using Landsat MSS, TM, ETM+ and SPOT satellite images to map deforestation and increase in forest cover do to conservation efforts inside and outside Gombe National Park.